The Forum Post of Doom

(A mysterious observer)

In a forest very distant from the area where the Demon lord’s friend breathed their last. A tiny sapling started to sprout from the ground near the area were the fruit of a particular tree had recently mysteriously fallen as if from nowhere. This was a very mysterious thing for while this was a kingdom of plant magical beasts and plant monsters, out of all the kinds of plants this kind of tree are among the most rare and special.

In fact almost all the known ones are hidden deeply in the kingdom and protected by the kingdoms fiercest flower fairies and plant warriors. Also most of these trees even the rare ones that live outside the hidden grove, at least have guardians that would protect and carefully monitor them and any possible offspring they might have.

Thus it seems impossible that the fruit and thus seed could have come from ‘that’ particular tree.  But there you go, in a area far from any plant towns or cities a sapling of a breed that could be considered plant royalty was growing in a place completely void of any intelligent life…except the sapling which strangely though just “born” in a sense, already had a strange ability to think.

Not so long ago:

The tree was once a young college student name: Brandon.  He was someone who would be called “nerd” or “bookworm”, he was fairly smart but debilitating shy. At least in real life, however online he had a very friendly and outgoing personality, and no matter the community or the forum he would participate in they would soon come to recognize him and be friendly towards him. Strangely, many people online would also greatly admire him. Their admiration would have been absolute if it weren’t for one thing…his strange obsession with a particular fanfiction…

At first had had disliked fanfiction. He had seen such works as nothing but trash. This was because he felt that fanfiction; or rather at least most fanfiction was basically insulting the work of the original author by stealing their work and then inserting a few subpar to trashy in quality scenes. He mostly stuck to reading translations of light novels, and manga online as his main source of entertainment.

But one day he, found out after stumbling into what he thought was just another translation of a light novel, that there were exceptions to his dislike of fanfiction, and this major exception turned out to be high quality original work. Unlike what he previously thought fanfiction was:

Original work instead of writing by  stealing most of their materials, instead would merely let themselves be inspired by the materials and then would create their own worlds characters and most importantly plotlines based around that inspiration. Of course not all original work was to his liking much of it wasn’t even truly original…but he found out that if he searched hard enough he would find pearls among the swine, and he learned to ignore the oinks of some of the swine, (bad spelling and grammar) in order to see if their pearls existed in their hearts.

Being an extremely fast reader with lots of free time it soon seemed to him that he had completely read all the completed works that were worth it, and was just waiting on the various ones he was interested in to update. But writing stories takes a lot of time for most people.

And while he greatly admired and even idolized people who had the ability to write (especially those who wrote stories of high quality that suited his tastes) he had zip talent in that area himself. This area was the area of writing original and creative works, however this didn’t mean he was a bad writer. Not it all, he was excellent in the basics of writing that is spelling, sentence structure, and grammar and most importantly he was almost professional in seeing the faults in others work.

So one day board and tired of looking at other peoples mistakes, he started writing reviews with a great amount of details. Most people who wrote reviews would only share their hate or love of the fanfiction in question, and most of the rest were either insulting the author or begging for more chapters. He was of the minority that would give specific and critical advice.

He would pick out each individual error and put them in the order of when you would see them, he would point out plot holes and character flaws and then suggest ways to fix them, most importantly of all he would do all of this in such a way that the authors were not offended and the readers were greatly entertained (by his humor and clear communication skills).  

He had only done his reviews out of boredom but to his surprise the authors were extremely grateful, and the readers were suitably impressed. Soon his forum inbox on several of the sights he had accounts on were filled with requests for his editor services, or pleas for advice on what he thought they should do with their stories. And so suddenly once more he was no longer bored. Besides going to school, (it was through a scholarship) he spent most of his time online with his new obsession of reading editing and reviewing various fanfics…although he found he liked some of them with none did he have a ‘favorite’ this changed however one day while he was browsing through the forums of his favorite fanfiction site and stumbled upon a strange review.

Fanfic: Kingdom Conquerors by TrueNoobB4

Review: 0 stars

Title: ABSOULUTELY SUCKS!!

Don’t read this fanfic!! Although you have to actually read the story in order to truly understand (as words can’t describe it) I BEG YOU!! Save yourself some agony and just don’t bother reading this crap at all! I ANTIRECCOMEND IT!

Posted by: Awkward-Potato

Comments:

(Most of the rest of the comments were of similar bent or angle and after those were comments that agreed with the comments posted above. Hoping to see if at least one comment actually admitted what was so bad about this mysteriously dissed fanfic. (He hadn’t even seen the worst kinds of fanfic get as much bad rep and insults as this one was getting so he couldn’t imagine what could possibly be so bad about it)

Mystique:

If I was the author I would hang myself in out of embarrassment…I have this theory, you know how they say “like parent like child?” Well I was thinking that as her works are so bad, then probably her quality as a person must be bad. If correct this means, that is she probably has no good qualities at all and should go just die.

Tr8TorBOY:

Whoa Mystique be careful you don’t want to get banned from this forum…I know for a fact that several of the admins are way into anti bullying. (But as surprisingly no admin has interfered with all these negative comments yet who knows what their stance its) But to continue what I was saying, you are being way to harsh, you know nothing about this person besides their fanfiction and I know for a fact that they have at least one good side. Because you have to at least admit that TrueNoobB4 is very brave. I at least wouldn’t be so courageous to keep posting my stories after seeing comments like this . in fact I would be far too ashamed to post anymore on this website (at least without changing my name first).  

D’retherbye:

I totally agree with you Tr8Tor, besides if you think about it she is doing all the authors on this site a valuable service; her works are so bad that after reading them, even the fanfics you thought were trash material before now look well written.  Basically she makes the previously thought bad look readable

TheFatal9:

This is true I read the BunnyNija series by MorbidLeacher after I attempted her work and it was almost enjoyable to me. I guess it is true that if you eat something edible after eating something inedible the bearably edible suddenly tastes delicious.

JusticeSolidier:

I totally agree! Her works make me feel good about myself as they are so much worse than even mine!

Brandon was increasingly curious, and soon possessed a desire similar to wanting to see a train wreck…curious as to Why no one had asked him to give a review or told him about this story as he was by now well known as someone who will read anything at least once he decided to post.

Brandon59:

Hey guys, I would join the party but I have never read this work. Why it is that no one told me about this? Especially you JusticeSolidier I helped you plenty in the past.  Most people would consider your works unreadable and I was able to help edit your works into being readable.  Didn’t you promise me that in return for helping you if you find somone who also needs help you will direct me to them?

Mystique:

TEACHER! TEACHER HAS POSTED HERE!

Tr8TorBOY:

Welcome Teacher

D’retherbye:

hey B-man don’t be so hard on JS we all decided anonymously and unanimously that  we should keep quiet about this work, though as you can see though we have recently found some positives to reading it…we just want to spare people agony as much as possible. Once seen it cannot be unseen and it makes you wish that brain bleach existed.

JusticeSolidier:

Sorry Teacher but don’t bother with your charity this person is a helpless case…several people have asked if they could try to help before and were refused, besides several tried to edit it without their permission…but “all who have faced that mountain have failed” I am told that they suffered severe headaches afterward. Please Teacher, have mercy on yourself and avoid this fate!

Brandon59:

Thanks for the concern? (I guess) but I think I am still going to read it after all

Mystique:

NO TEACHER DON’T READ THAT *&^%^%$!!!&%$%^%&*!!*&^%%$^!!!

[Mystique has been temporarily banned from this forum by a watching Admin]

So Brandon, not wanting to miss any details before he actually reads the story reads the comments for each fanfiction chapter that that TrueNoob person posted. To their surprise after every 100 comments made the notorious authoress herself would come out and post a reply…he smirked after  he read the first one.  

TrueNoobB4:

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Thank you all for taking the time to comment on my work. As it is so gratifying as an author too see, that people will actually read the things I write thank you!

And he soon found out that, all the comments were like this first one! She never insulted her naysayers back but neither did she ever acknowledge her supposed worthlessness as an author. She also often thanked them for commenting. Of course some people thought she was being sarcastic and slyly insulting them.

Still others felt pity for her (or at least pretended too) and offered strange advice that didn’t make sense in a way. Like “try harder” and “just give up”. Some people made spelling or grammar errors in their posts and now and then she would ‘kindly’ correct them. This of course made her haters even more angry. But a few humorously said that if she wasn’t such a bad writer to the extent that they were afraid she would taint their work, that they would ask her to be their editor.

Finally after reading all the comments Brandon decided several things…the first was that the hatred aimed at this person seemed mysteriously unreasonable even if their work really was bad. The other was that no matter how their worked turned out he really wanted to meet that person. They seemed really interesting almost like their personality was straight out of a web novel or a manga.

It was almost heroic in a sense how they kept posting their work despite all the hatred…and how it didn’t seem to affect them in anyway. In fact they seemed to go out of their way to help the people that tormented them. Lastly he really wanted to not hate the fanfiction. Not just because the idea of being different from everybody else gave him a thrill.

He didn’t like the idea that someone who seemed to be working so hard to write a fanfiction (They posted at least once a week usually more) would actually work hard to write a bad one. Plus from their posts he could tell that they were talented and entertaining writer…so if the story really was bad they were probably doing it on purpose.

So he clicked on TrueNoobB4’s name in order to reach her various fanfics…she had three. The first two were “The Mysterious origins of Purl” and “The Machinations of the gods”. Figuring that these two were basic info dumps…he decided to skip them and start with the one the others had been taking about which was “Kingdom Conquerors” . He ended up reading for 12 hours forgot to do his homework and almost missed school the next day.

His mind was blown and he was hooked. He read all three fanfics and the first two did turn out to be somewhat of information dumps but it was more myths and legends and history rather than an unedited wiki article. Of course after reading and greatly enjoying the work he developed a great desire to share his feelings with someone, however there was the problem to the strange reaction of people towards it.

After thinking about it for a while, and weighing the pros and cons he decided to go against the majority of public opinion and state his true feelings in the review he wrote. Needless to say…the community was stunned. Here was their admired friend and he for the first time was getting something wrong!

However Brandon didn’t really care about what others thought and continued to write raving reviews and comment with a purposeful style that indicated he had no clue what the others were talking about when they said that the story was bad.

There was one thing that surprised him though, and that was it seemed liked the author herself had nothing to say about his comments…she didn’t reply to a single one… He decided that she must be shy or something similar (or maybe so shocked to have a fan that she couldn’t speak) and so he started to up his comments and reviews…and also he started to send private messages as well. They were all about asking questions on various parts of the story that he was interested in and weren’t given as much word count as he would have liked. And too his surprise she eventually answered.

He discovered she was a witty and engaging conversationalist and that they had many things in common. He found for the first time that there was someone whom he could talk to and share things with and who would share things with him. They had a very honest and sincere relationship in fact whenever he messed up in writing she would critique him…and in such a way that he would become better at writing. In return all those questions he asked about the world she wrote about inspired her to write even more kinds of stories.

One in particular (which besides the first thing he read became his favorite) followed the life of a young demon born to a vampire and a minor demon lord. And this demon really lived up to his name which in human tongue could roughly be translated as bravery. It seemed like he knew no fear. When the pure bloods started beating up on him he would just let them and not say anything at all or even make a single noise. On the other hand if they were ganging up on other halfies he would attack and try his best to defend even when he was greatly out powered and outnumbered…

Strangely though understandably to Brandon although those he treated kindly those he rescued and they usually would come to greatly admire them. He didn’t befriend any of them. This was mostly because they didn’t’ want to get involved with the bullies but also because he didn’t want to become friends with people who only saw one aspect of him. That was a common theme in TrueNoobB4’s stories, the difference between seeing someone on the surface and seeing someone’s true self.

Another story that took place several hundred years later followed a very similar theme. It was about the story of a peasant who wanted to become stronger but was restricted by the law of their kingdom. As explained in “Kingdom Conquerors” whoever ruled a kingdom influenced more than just the “human law” of the land rather their law would become the lands law.  And thus when the law was broken there was often punishment that came from non-human sources.

This peasant who actually didn’t really have a name their parents being an unimaginative sort often broke the laws. The land would then send monsters after them…but surprisingly usually through wit and plan they would slaughter all the monsters. They would get stronger but as it is illegal for an ordinary peasant to sell monster loot…they couldn’t gain much else from it. Things picked up greatly when he decided to become a guard and managed to squeeze into a recruit position when a battle decimated their ranks. Unfortunately for him but greatly entertaining for the reader he was picked to be the companion of a hero…which despite what one might think wasn’t exactly a good thing.

Brandon continued to read but when he got too the end of a cliff hanger in the story he decided to beg his friend for a spoiler.

OtherWorlds!?.com

A fanfiction review and publishing forum

(Private Chat)

TrueNoobB4:

…and so the demon lord Valiant tricked the churches army into thinking that the lesser demon they defeated was him and went home to mourn the friend he had made and lost almost at the same time.

Brandon59:

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE SPOILERS!!

TrueNoobB4:

Anything for my biggest fan

Brandon59:

Really? You are too generous!

TrueNoobB4:

not really, as besides being my biggest fan you are also practically my only fan…

Brandon59:

I still don’t get why that is you are so good!!

TrueNoobB4:

please if I was “so good” would my fanfictions have only one star?

Brandon59:

Not true some of them have two…

TrueNoobB4:

the reviews said that they only gave me two because they wanted to be different from everybody else and they felt pity on me…

Brandon59: …

TrueNoobB4:

Well moving along from this pointless subject…there is something I have to tell you.  

Brandon59:

What is it?

TrueNoobB4:

I just found out that…there is something that requires my full attention, thus sadly I won’t be able to chat with you for a while…

TrueNoobB4: Well?!

Brandon59:

I am really sorry to hear that…I will be very lonely and board, why you ask? Without any new “Kingdom Conquerors” chapters to read I will be bored out of my mind…and if I can’t talk to you…my only (sniff, sniff) true friend…OH HOW LONELY I WILL BE!!

TrueNoobB4:

Don’t be so dramatic (smirks) no wonder you don’t have any real friends

Brandon59:

you are probably right about that…

TrueNoobB4: …

Brandon59:

Oh wait before I forget exactly how long will you be gone, can you give me an estimate?

TrueNoobB4:

At least a couple of days…maybe even a week…

Brandon59:

I will be counting down the days, no the hours, no the minutes, no event the seconds…!

TrueNoobB4:

bye B59

Brandon59:

B4! NO WAIT!

[TrueNoobB4 has left the chatting session]

Brandon59:

You Little! Oh well…guess I will see you later

[Brandon59 has left the chatting session]

A few days later Brandon was turning his computer on impatiently, intending to access the fanfiction website. Although Brandon had his own personal copies of TrueNoob’s work however he was of the opinion that it was best read in its original state and thus feeling lonely a few days after TrueNoob “left” he decided to reread his favorite “Kingdom Conquerors” from the beginning to end.

He felt since this would take several days by the time he would be done she would be back. But to his great surprise he noticed that the thread that the story was on had been recently updated (only a few minutes ago in fact). This was a rare thing as most people had grown bored of insulting the work or because they considered themselves “Teacher’s” fans they decided to no insult his favorite work…

Then they found out he wasn’t impressed with false flattery intended to gain his favor, or in other words “sucking up” (you know a** kissing). So instead of starting to read the series as intended, he instead decided to read the post first and see who was posting and what they were saying about his friends work.

MalloryTheGoddess:  

Does anyone who has read this work like the world of Purl? It is a most impressive world isn’t? If you could travel there would you like too?  

Brandon59:

I am excited to see that there is another fan of this series besides me. First of all congratulations and welcome to the exclusive club of liking “Kingdom Conquerors” I can also see we have different tastes. You seem to enjoy TrueNoob’s world building the most. While I am greatly impressed by the detail and scale of Purl, my favorite part of the story would have to be all the interesting characters. But to answer your question I think if I could travel to purl I would probably be tempted into going.

To Brandon’s surprise the person who had posted replied a few seconds after his post.

MalloryTheGoddess:  

Oh, so you are impressed by the great Purl eh? So now a much more important question, I as a Goddess have the power to take you to Purl. So right now, would you agree for me to take you to Purl?

Brandon59 : sure but I

Brandon didn’t get to finish let alone post the rest of his reply, this was because seconds after he failed to type the rest, in front of his computer, the young man was staring glassy eyed at the screen body limp skin already chilling in death.